mutual complicity that for the first time gave me a hint of hope. She was not quite oblivious to her husband's or the island's attitude.
'Yes, I agree,' I said. 'I think our little adventure was great but there's no future in it for either of us.'
I lied with impunity knowing that she knew I was lying but that it served both our purposes equally. She would go along with it.
'I hadn't planned on this second encounter.' Her words were cryptic. 'But it may well have been necessary. Sometimes once is not enough.'
Her tone had completely softened and had a trace of warmth and femininity.
'I find it hard to keep up this charade,' she added more cryptically.
As I made for the door, I looked back and saw she was crying. There was now no sense of the maniacal but of the vulnerable and the weak. I stopped and almost felt like going back to offer comfort. I could feel her deep pain but didn't know what it was. As I felt sympathy, I felt a whole load lift from my shoulders. I realised that this person standing tearfully despondent before me, was not the threat that, in my moments of horror, I made her out to be. I was free. Elation coursed through me. Somehow my wild absurd impulse had led to a cleansing of my tormented mind. All my fears dissipated and vanished. I could get back to my life and my contemplation.
Back at the camp I made myself breakfast and ate it with a new found appetite. After I sat at the cliff edge and set about assessing where I was. The trip to the island was meant to be a personal journey. I was looking for enlightenment that would carry me into the twilight years of my life. I did not want to spend the rest of my days on this beautiful planet, in a state of denial and ignorance. The petty issues of everyday life had no appeal for me. I had lost interest in acquiring material things and in meaningless social interaction. The days of small talk and idle chat were gone. Time was now too precious. That did not mean that I frantically chased here and there to do things, but more that I relaxed and allowed my existence to flow forth at its own pace. I searched inwardly but also inwardly into the common human experience. It was in the vast accumulating store of human knowledge that I could best find meaning. Whatever little, if any, I could add to that great bank, would be my epitaph. It would be the worth of my existence. Far more than the memory of those who knew me or even loved me, the legacy of the mind lives beyond the body. To craft this legacy, was what I had set as my goal for the remaining years.
Not that I felt I was about to die - not at all, I never felt healthier in my life. No it was because I had reached that point in life where I knew I was past the mid-point. Hereafter it was to the certain descent towards oblivion. This looming wall of nothingness was frightening and yet a challenge. By trying to see beyond it I was like the quantum particle tunnelling through the potential barrier. It was not possible yet it happens - albeit in very low probabilities.
I needed to assess how far I had gone along my chosen road. The choice of the island retreat had seemed a good idea. I would be alone. I was to cut myself off entirely from people and live off my own thoughts. I was to have endless time to think - to analyse and synthesize, dissect and relate. The learning of the previous few years was to be my substrate upon which the germs of enlightenment might flourish. My secret intention was to try to relate this vast body of knowledge to my own personal experience and prospect for the small gold nuggets of discovery. It is this discovery that expands humanity's overall knowledge of itself and its relation to its environment.
For too long philosophers tended to look inward and deny the influence of the environment - the locality of causal influences on the organism. More and more this causality is now deemed to be non-local and the significance of this has yet to be stitched in to philosophical dialectic. We look to language or metaphysics for the essence of our existence. I struggled to read the philosophers who invented a new dictionary of words to describe reality. They were based on metaphysics not on real experiment. I have placed my faith in real experiment, in real experience. I am not a positivist, logical or otherwise, but I am rational to the extent that all knowledge comes from an external objective world that exists with or without human intelligence. Modern quantum theories, that place the observer as the creator of reality when he makes a measurement, are following on the tradition of the earlier philosophers, who have created a metaphysic to model their personal sense of reality. The modern quantum physicist at least can boast that all current experiment supports his position and that is why I place more value on his particular paradigm of the world. Yet I can only go so far in agreeing with quantum theory that suggests an anthropological reason for the world being as it is. It places mankind at the centre of our particular universe and that just seems too inefficient. The size of the universe in terms of size and scale is too vast to exist solely for the evolution of life on a tiny blue insignificant planet. The complexity of life that has evolved on this planet in the last four to five billion years does not suggest that humanity is a necessary or even likely outcome. The anthropocentric view of reality and its antecedent philosophical forebears does not convince.
So if I have to reject the human-centred view of the world, I am forced to see the world as a complex place, where amongst other things intelligent life exists, at least in one small locale. This places my own existence in its proper context as being almost non-existent in both time and space. If my existence is so irrelevant, how do I conduct my moral actions in the local here and now. What are my constraints? What laws guide me? I look to knowledge of the physical laws of the world to guide me. Einstein showed that the laws on the cosmological scale are different only in the extreme margins from the local laws. There is curvature of space but it is evident only at cosmological distances. Locally we can ignore its existence. But the crucial thing is that the same laws apply. From this I take it that whatever laws govern the greater evolution of the universe, are also the laws covering the evolution of life. In the analysis of life evolution, we must look for the hidden curvature, that element of evolution that is hidden from us at our local scale, but which will materialise at the cosmic level. It is possible that the moral law is a physical law, maybe even the law of gravity. We accept that gravity puts constraints on our physical disposition, in its local form of making us stick to the surface of the earth - giving us weight, limiting our movement through friction. In effect gravity is the main constraint in the life of a human scale organism. We are prisoners of gravity.
But how could gravity lead to a moral law? At first glance it appears a cold and lifeless thing. Yet the essence of gravity is that it brings unity. It is a force that tries to bring together. It is this force that caused the vast clouds of primordial gases to coalesce and form galaxies. Within these swirling galaxies, suns sparkled into life under its influence. Gravity triggered the nuclear fusion within the suns that was the melting pot for the formation of elements. Gravity took the remains of exploding suns and cast them into agglomerations, we now call planets. Gravity helped the planets form a biosphere and eventually the formation of organic molecules and later life.
With such an intrinsic involvement in the origins of life, it is not crazy to assume that gravity has a similar influence in the formation of human life. We can attribute our size to the fact that gravity puts restrictions on how much weight our skeletons can support. Even if we had bigger skeletons there is an upper limit to the size of all creatures. Eventually the skeleton reaches its limit and as with the dinosaurs the creature must take to the water.
From the earliest times the primitive human used the gravity of the stick with a stone on the end to create greater force. This force represented more power and with power comes use and abuse. It is not without reason that justice is seen as a balance with gravity the unseen operator. The history of humanity is a history of the oscillating power struggles of disparate groups. For most of our history this power has been mediated by gravitational influence. Human morality emanated from within power bases. It was the morality of the mighty that held sway for most of our history and per
haps even so today. The powerful must be obeyed. This rule applied both between societies and within societies.
But such a moral law was crude and societies who practised it, could soon displaced by those whose sense of justice, while still power based, was applied more broadly and evenly. Gravity applies to all things evenly regardless of mass - the feather falls at the same rate as the canon ball in a vacuum. But life isn't a vacuum and there is drag. This is what leads to imbalance in the application of justice. Some are stronger, some are bigger because the environment makes them that way. Strip away the environment and we are all made equal over time.
The gravitational analogy though tenuous gives us a feeling for how the moral laws under which we all operate may have a broader base than local human society. This is what religions have contended, positing a divine overseer. But the religious stance attempts to place the divine outside the laws, whereas the laws are just the laws and what evolves evolves in accordance with those laws. Science still has not decoded the laws that govern the universe and our reality within it. With the wild